Crows Officially Annnounced by MCDM

MCDM Productions has officially announced Crows, a new dungeon-crawling RPG. The new RPG is being led by James Introcaso, with Nick De Spain directing the art. The game is described as a game about staring death in the face and grabbing as much loot from dungeons before your luck runs out. The game is played using D6s and D10s, with a health system similar to Knave in which inventory slots doubles as a health tracker.

In a Patreon post released today, Introcaso described Crows and its differences from Draw Steel. For one, experience points is determined by calculating the value of loot taken from a dungeon. Crows retains the power roll from Draw Steel but with some differences as to the result of the roll. Unlike Draw Steel, where the power roll always results in some kind of benefit for the player, the power roll in Crows has negative results for low rolls. However, players have no limit to the number of circumstantial bonuses they have in Crows, which can result in higher results with good planning.

Other nuances mentioned in the post include that all players can use any equipment they might find (spellbooks were given as an example), but some character classes will be more attuned to certain kinds of equipment. There's also a base building component to Crows, in which players build up the town they're headquartered in. There will also be a default campaign setting for Crows, described as a world in which Archmages were eventually corrupted by the magic they wielded and became Necromancers who waged war on each other until they all disappeared.

No release date was announced for Crows, but MCDM plans to provide updates on the development of Crows via its various social media platforms.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Now, one of the major reasons survival horror works in video games is that there is never, ever any major RNG in it. The moment RNG gets seriously involved with survival horror, it stops becoming horror, and it becomes a numbers game, a game about mitigating RNG, not about survival horror. Survival horror relies on you suffering because of surprises, mistakes, overreaches, and so on, not because you got screwed by the dice.

But video games are a different beast. I think you're absolutely right in your assessment that with video games, randomized elements would be a fat fit for survival horrors in the way that they're articulated. But you obviously can't reproduce this the exact same way with TTRPG, you have to create the emotions, the tension and the dynamics in different ways.

And aside from being theatrical in your descriptions, having moody lighting and music, it boils down to mechanics and rules to create dynamics. I don't think their approach is bad. I've had terrifying moments of anticipation with the few knobs they're playing with. Torchbearer is a good example that comes to mind.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think their approach is bad. I've had terrifying moments of anticipation with the few knobs they're playing with.

I don't think the whole approach is bad, but "terrifying moments of anticipation" are not something unique or specific to survival horror.

Extraction shooters absolutely have that as well, in fact it's perhaps even more pronounced in that case.

I think it's a two specific mechanical approaches that will lead them to making an extraction shooter (extraction sworder? In games it still gets called an extraction shooter in the medieval fantasy themed ones, of which there are a few):

1) You can extract at your choice.

You can't extract by choice in survival horror. Period. If you could it wouldn't be survival horror! Like if you could just turn around and leave and declare yourself the winner in Resident Evil or L4D or whatever, that wouldn't work. In RPGs which align with survival horror, like Mothership, pretty much every adventure is carefully designed so the PCs cannot, in fact, extract until they've basically won.

2) Heavy use of RNG.

And in fact, he keeps saying he wants to make the game swingier or more random throughout the post. And it's like buddy, that's fine, you can do that. It will absolutely NOT support the "survival horror" vibe though unless the PCs are incredibly durable - and he seems to be suggesting the opposite is the case. Survival horror PCs are generally pretty durable though, so I guess we'll see.

I'm not sure what the game quite is here - I dunno if Haeck is just unaware of extraction as a genre, I follow him on Bluesky and I don't think I've ever seen him mention it - or if he doesn't want to bring that up because extraction games are extremely trendy right now and he feels people might react badly to an extraction RPG.

To be clear, I don't think anything he's suggesting will necessarily make for a bad game. It just won't make for a game anything at all like Resident Evil, but will make for one like The Hunt: Showdown.

 

[zakael19]

and he feels people might react badly to an extraction RPG.

I mean, isn't this the entirety of classic dungeon crawling?

 

[timbannock]

I'll admit that while I like the theory behind "inventory is intertwined with wounds," I've yet to really love it in practice.

On the larger topic: kind of as I imagined, it's interesting how this is stacking up against Flail by Games Omnivorous.

 

[Superchunk77]

So he's making a Shadowdark clone that uses different dice sizes. Meh.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean, isn't this the entirety of classic dungeon crawling?

I think if Haeck saw it that way, he'd have said so.

And I don't it was really true, in practice, either - I only played a little in the 1980s, but looking at older dungeon design, people's accounts of adventures from that era, and so on, I don't like "loot half the dungeon, skip any big fights, get out alive and never look back" was really the vibe. It was more like a subgenre. I can think of precisely one (1) adventure I played in all of 2E where we did that, and we only did it because we got SO much loot it would have been completely insane from an in-character perspective to not turn around and leave.

But Haeck opens by talking about how the crows "dive" into these ruins, which is absolutely extraction shooter, and really isn't trad dungeon crawling.

More to the point, it's really, really not survival horror, which is reliant on you not being able to go "Nah screw this for a game of soldiers!" because your pockets are jingling with coin.

All that said, it may not be a mistake - it may be that "dungeon extraction" has more legs than "dungeon survival horror" or "classic dungeoncrawl".

 

[zakael19]

I think if Haeck saw it that way, he'd have said so.

And I don't it was really true, in practice, either - I only played a little in the 1980s, but looking at older dungeon design, people's accounts of adventures from that era, and so on, I don't like "loot half the dungeon, skip any big fights, get out alive and never look back" was really the vibe. It was more like a subgenre. I can think of precisely one (1) adventure I played in all of 2E where we did that, and we only did it because we got SO much loot it would have been completely insane from an in-character perspective to not turn around and leave.

But Haeck opens by talking about how the crows "dive" into these ruins, which is absolutely extraction shooter, and really isn't trad dungeon crawling.

More to the point, it's really, really not survival horror, which is reliant on you not being able to go "Nah screw this for a game of soldiers!" because your pockets are jingling with coin.

All that said, it may not be a mistake - it may be that "dungeon extraction" has more legs than "dungeon survival horror" or "classic dungeoncrawl".

Ok my bad, I should've said "classic dungeon crawling in the OSR sense" since you know, he's referencing teh OSR scene a lot in that blog. And generally that's the vibe they preach: extraction of loot to gain xp over fighting, working to use smarts over character abilities (potentially manifesting here as both situational modifiers & "you just do it" stuff?), an emphasis on inventory management and hard choices, etc.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This very much feels like Knave combined with Draw Steel, which is an interesting combo.

 

[Scribe]

This very much feels like Knave combined with Draw Steel, which is an interesting combo.

So a more tactical/crunch dungeon crawler?

I'm ignorant to Knave.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So a more tactical/crunch dungeon crawler?

I'm ignorant to Knave.

Knave is a very light OSR game by Ben "Questing Beast" Milton. It's classless, with the equipment characters pick up determining their abilities (pick up a spellbook, get to cast the spell associated with it). I'm pretty sure it also uses equipment slots as hit points, although maybe I'm conflating it with another OSR game.

The crunchy parts of Crows appear to be coming from its Draw Steel parentage.